In a very large number of the BoM weather stations, tipping-bucket rain gauges of various makes have been in operation for over 15 years. Those gauges record every observation of 0.2 mm of precipitation (mostly rain). BoM aggregates those to half hourly data enabling us to correctly calculate hourly data with the pairing to suit each data format’s time convention: for EPW the 2 half-hours before the time stamp and ACDB the half hour before and after the time stamp; both to be synchronised with their respective solar irradiation data and cloud cover data. (Note that the TMY2 format has no space for adding precipitation observations and therefore cannot be given this data enhancement.) In the handful of key weather stations like the capital cities and Alice Springs, they were operating even before 1990, the year when satellite observations began of cloud cover and solar irradiation data inferred from those observations.
Accordingly, the climate data sets based on the latest 15 years 2008-2022 have had the coincident precipitation data added to them and are now available through our sales portal.
Similarly, the 33-year weather data sets will have the precipitation data older than 15 years added as far back as it has been collected, but for now the 33-year climate data years cannot be enhanced that way because some of the 12 individual months that have been selected as most normal will be from years which pre-date the collection of half-hourly data.
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